“The man who put this bunch together wont escape cross-examination. Theo Epstein is a tremendous general manager when common sense and context are considered, but he must be accountable for the Lackey and Crawford contracts provided the latter wasnt pushed on him by ownership desperate to boost NESN ratings. I do not want him to lose his job or bolt for the Cubs by any means; I want him to find his way out of this mess he has created. And I trust he will.

As for the manager, please dont bring those ill-considered gripes to me, the reactionary argument that someones head has to roll, that Terry Francona has gone too soft. Save the shrieking for someone else; Im going to be more infuriated if Francona leaves than I was when Papelbon threw that meatball to Nolan Reimold. Just because Francona doesnt light up his players to the media doesnt mean hes passive behind closed doors. Hes honest, funny, and sarcastic — Im sure he gets his points across. Again, please, try to keep perspective, and that goes double for anyone in ownership who wrongheadedly thinks Bobby Valentine is the solution to anything.”

“The marginal advantage embodies the notion that one cannot, and should not, try to “win big.” In a competitive setting, the strong player knows that his best opponents are unlikely to make many exploitable mistakes. As a result, the strong player knows that he must be content to play with just the slightest edge, an edge which is the equivalent to the marginal advantage. More importantly, a one-sided match ultimately carries as much weight as an epic struggle. After all, the match results only in a win or a loss; there are no “degrees” of winning. Therefore, at any given point in a game, the player must focus on making decisions that minimize his probability of losing the advantage, rather than on decisions that maximize his probability of gaining a greater advantage. In short, it is much more important to the expert player to not lose than it is to win big. Consequently, a regular winner plays to extend his lead in a very gradual, but very consistent manner.”

‘”My first day of training on the yacht and I’d already managed to break something. A sail was tumbling down and the boat was losing speed. The first mate darted across the boat to find out what had happened and I started in on a long and rambling tale of the series of unfortunate events which had, through no fault of my own, caused the damage we were looking at right now. I was barely three sentences in, when the mate interrupted me: ‘I don’t give a crap whose fault it was, I just need to know what to fix’.”

“We like to think of illness as something that happens to all of us in the same way: tuberculosis or cancer do not recognize the differences between beggars and kings, Africans and Europeans, black or white, man or woman. But when it comes to mental illness, diseases may manifest in myriad culture-specific ways. Some mental illnesses, if not, radically, most of them, may be created by culture. Penis panics, Wendigo psychoses and dancing manias are examples of culture-bound syndromes.”